


fully automated luxury cyberpunk

by endeofblood



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-typical Decapitation, Canon-typical swearing, CrockerCorp is evil, Dirk Strider (mentioned) - Freeform, Emetophobia, Jake English (mentioned) - Freeform, Jane Crocker (mentioned) - Freeform, M/M, Multi, Nonconsensual Body Modification, Roxy Lalonde/Calliope/Feferi Peixes (mentioned), Spades Slick (briefly), The Condesce (mentioned) - Freeform, blink and you miss it implied/referenced emotional manipulation, canon-typical gross jokes, if youre a robot i guess lol, jake english/dirk strider (mentioned) - Freeform, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-02 07:19:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19194295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endeofblood/pseuds/endeofblood
Summary: Jellyfishmurderer:"hmmm maybe something cyber punky :3cc something 80s anime inspired where they boys have cool technology...karkat is a Robot,,,theyre all into drag racing,,sollux is a cyber criminal and someone is a cop chasing him...u kno anything super fun and exciting like that maybe....idk lol i know i keep saying this but im still just fr open to anything/any interpretations....i just really love edgy shit lmfao!"





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jellyfishmurderer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jellyfishmurderer/gifts).



> Hopefully I hit that angsty/campy/anticapitalist cyberpunk equilibrium that we all need and deserve in the year of our Lord 2k19

“Oh God, we’re dead, haha—oh my God, oh my Jesus Christ, we’re dead. We are dead!”  
  
“Technically—” Sollux corrects him, leaning out from behind the pillar “—I’m dead and you’re deactivated, but, semantics.” His tongue catches his teeth on the last consonant and he sucks a breath in past the noise, caught between a laugh and a wince at his own tone-deaf joke. There isn’t much to see anyway; the Underground hasn’t been used since public transport was privatized—and upgraded—by CrockerCorp. Also, it’s just dark as hell, and the air’s heavy with growth and rot. (Ironic, that, maybe. This world doesn’t have a lot of growing or a lot of rotting.)  
  
Karkat doesn’t find his joke any funnier. Even in the dim light of the abandoned railway station, Sollux can just barely make out the backlight of his red irises and the way his pupils contract and expand incrementally, with edges that aren’t as smooth as eyes should be. It reminds him of the lens of a camera struggling to adjust, of a shutter; the fact he looks almost human in most other ways doesn’t help much. The scowl that those eyes are attached to wishes it could be half as unnerving. “It’s a goddamn shame you already gave up your day job, Captor.”   
  
Sollux rolls his own eyes for nobody’s benefit.   
  
“I need to scope out that shitty coolant system of yours before you manage to cook your processor alive,” he adds absently as he glances back around the rounded edge. That’s another thing—the rattling from Karkat’s chest only kicks up another half degree when Sollux calls attention to it, and if his face could color he has a feeling that it might.   
  
“ _Your_ shitty coolant system,” Karkat corrects, accusing tone contoured by embarrassment. The edge is nearly swallowed by the disjointed humming of the fan. “It isn’t on me that I sound like someone’s trying to mine cryptocurrency on an A/C unit.”   
  
Sollux waves him off. “I think I saw something.”   
  
“Saw what?”   
  
“A light.”   
  
“Do you mean like a dron—” It’s a testament to how scared shitless the pair of them are: when Sollux holds a finger up, they both actually go silent. Aside, of course, from the sharp complaint emanating from Karkat’s ribs.   
  
To answer his question, though, no. It isn’t quite like a drone. Not like the one that had chased them down there, anyway. That had been standard issue: something built for tracking, small and faceless and with fingers of cyan blue light streaked down either side. They’d lost sight of it about a quarter mile back.  
  
This is different. Sollux’s eyes are having an even harder time adjusting than Karkat’s, but he can see the way those lights flicker in half-second intervals across the ground, outlining the bottom half of a humanoid silhouette. Whoever—whatever—it is, they’re sweeping down the station systematically. Unhurried. They wind through the station pillars, and the figure flits in and out of view. The floor—opaque layers of glass stacked atop each other with patterns that look like marble with more depth—takes the light and scatters it, casting it against piles of trash (coffee cups, station maps, old flyers advertising a change in regime) and the walls.  
  
Distantly, he can hear the figure dragging something across the floor. It sounds metallic.   
  
Sollux swears softly.   
  
(The scraping is a deep, steady baseline, playing off the staccato of accompanying footfall and the godawful harmonization of that fan. The rotting air doesn’t absorb an inch. Sollux’s fingers play against the straps of his own backpack nervously.)   
  
“Alright, KK, time to haul ass.” His lips hardly move with the effort of speaking. Then he reaches backwards to try and grasp at Karkat’s shoulder—Karkat’s hand meets his instead, fingers interlocking, and he nearly rends Sollux’s shoulder from its socket as he breaks for the other side of the station.   
  
*First: the footsteps behind them pick up.   
  
*Second: they stop.   
  
*Third: Sollux notes on some edge of his awareness that Karkat has gone quiet, too.   
  
*Fourth: Karkat hasn’t slowed and Sollux is reasonably sure he isn’t being pulled along by his own shadow but he can’t hear the hum of the fan and he can’t hear his own steps and he can’t even hear his heart hammering in his ears anymore it’s almost like everything’s—   
  
*Fifth:   
  
*Sixth:   
  
*Seventh: Son of a bitch, that hurt.   
  
Something hit them and it hit them hard and it hit them loud. A wave of noise—blunt force between his shoulder blades send him scrambling forward, but he isn’t quite able to balance himself before his knees and palms hit glass ground. Swearing again, Karkat grabs him by the back of the shirt, pulling him into a subway car.   
  
“Jesus!”   
  
That’s Karkat, but his voice sounds several layers of drywall removed; the sound is clotting and congealing in Sollux’s ears like blood. Sollux tries to force the doors closed—fingers finding little purchase on the metal, but white-knuckle gripping the edge of one until something yields—and gets them most of the way there before he gives up, scrambling backwards. “Fuck,” he says, then repeats, emphatically: “ _Fuck._ ”   
  
Karkat is steadying himself on the back of a seat, fingers sinking into the padded plastic. The whirring has resumed in earnest, and for all of his joking, Sollux is half-afraid he really is going to overheat.   
  
“That’s one of CrockerCorp’s dollar store shitheels.” Karkat manages to choke out, voice clipped as if it’s physically stuck between the blades of the fan.   
  
“Really? And here I’d thought we’d accidentally skipped out on a tab.”   
  
Sollux can hear the footsteps outside again, somewhere under the sound of his own voice. They’re as quiet and as unhurried as before (maybe because whoever’s attached to them knows they can’t exactly get far like this)—methodical might be the word, systematic. Professional? Professional could work; CrockerCorp has always taken pride in that.   
  
Well, CrockerCorp, as far as he’s concerned, can get a ripe taste of its own ass, and he deposits his bag on a nearby subway chair.   
  
“What are you doing?”   
  
“Seeing if they still want their shit back.”   
  
“Captor—” It’s a warning. Concerned, but not prohibitive. The footsteps are just outside the train door as Sollux pulls a cord from the bag. He feeds it down the back of his shirt and it clicks magnetically into the ports down the length of his artificial spine, starting with the base of his neck and working its way down. The electric nodes on the other end fit perfectly over the pads of his fingers, and he plays one hand in the air, making sure it syncs up to his nervous system—gratifyingly, it sparks, blue and red, as it should. He rolls his shoulders and feels the energy sing beneath his skin.  
  
A double-pronged piece of metal—it’s near shaped like a sword, maybe, but with no middle or tip—is thrust between the subway doors, and its owner tries to use the leverage to pry them back open.  
  
Sollux can’t quite get a clear look (a red sleeve, a flash of dark plastic) but he doesn’t need one. He raises a hand, palm forward (a sharp whistle in the air, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end) and sparks dance in his vision as the metal shrieks for just a moment, doors giving way easily.  
  
That bags a yelp, a stretch of silence, and a groan, in that exact order. Sollux pokes his head out to see the figure laid flat underneath the newly freed sliding doors. The decaying air is alive again with the heavy scent of ozone.    
  
A single sneakered foot pokes out from underneath the metal.  
  
“Did you kill them?” Karkat asks, nudging Sollux aside—with the strategic application of his elbow—just enough to get a look at what’s going on.  
  
“Uh,” Sollux says.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Um.”  
  
“...You’ve gone and done it, that harness has finally finished serving up your paltry grey matter like reheated finger food.”  
  
“Hm.”  
  
Sollux steps off the subway and approaches.  Not quite into spitting distance, though—he uses the psion energy from the harness he’s plugged into to move a door. Just enough to get a good look at who they’ve bagged.  
  
He sees a sword-sized tuning fork (or something like it—Crocker tech, certainly).  He also sees a man in a red velvet suit, a full visor helmet, and light up sketchers. It is, without a doubt, the absolute dumbest outfit he’s ever seen on a fully grown man.  
  
“Holy shit, Dave.”


	2. Chapter 2

Getting Dave out of the Underground and onto the street was another matter.  He’s been pretty well and truly K/O’d, which was a point in their favor, granted—and heightwise, he strikes a middle ground between Karkat and Sollux, which is another logistical plus. There’s a fair amount of squabbling regarding what to do with his bullshit pseudo-sword, though, which hampers proceedings pretty considerably.    
  
“So we’ll throw it on the tracks, then!  Fuck, Captor, I’m not babysitting knicknacks from our dystopian overlords!”  
  
“We don’t know what it—“  
  
“Hmm, gee golly. Pick me then, I have a pretty educated guess.”  
  
“Ok, that thing you just said? Don’t do that with your mouth again, preferably ever.”  
  
There’s some awkward shuffling and reshuffling around. Peace is finally made: Karkat, as he is built like a brick shithouse, hauls Dave up through the hidden entrance. Since the Underground had been boarded up some years ago, they’d blasted a hole with Sollux’s flashy little gadget near the gutters. It wasn’t exactly concealed perfectly from the Powers that Be, but most laymen wouldn’t give it much of a first glance, let alone a second.  
  
Meanwhile, Sollux keeps an eye on the tech. For all his bluster, Karkat didn’t actually push back much. Ex-techie perks: at least Sollux feels pretty confident that he knows enough to not blow all three of them to high hell.    
  
Outside, it’s still dark. The air is warm and dry. In a world where life and death are pretty well a matter of opinion, there really isn’t much growth, isn’t much rot. Even from here— _here_ being Alternia, which is practically a prison district, given the level of security—it’s pretty goddamn sterile. Some might even make the argument that it’s beautiful, with its warm shades immortalized in neon. The accents of cyan are fewer and farther between than they are up north, towards the capitol. The eyes of Crocker’s post-capitalist empire are paradoxically distant and intimate, reflected in the nonexistent gaze of the scouting and security drones, but usually safe from her flesh-and-blood hired mooks.  
  
Well, usually, at least. Apparently Ms. Crocker was shaking things up a bit.  
  
Karkat gets the man in the velvet suit set up on a nearby bench, which is to say, he unceremoniously dumps him on the nearest horizontal surface. Sollux watches with an expression that’s even more unreadable than his usual brand.  
  
“...So?” Karkat presses the heel of his hand against his own chest, finally stabilizing enough that the fan cools from a panicked wheeze to an almost comforting background hum. It’s a noise Sollux doesn’t sleep well without these days.  
  
“So what?” Sollux, meanwhile, manages to get himself unhooked from the psion harness.  Not a moment too soon, either; modifications aside, his body is flesh and blood, and the use of Crocker’s biomechanics sends pressure building in his temples.  He’s still seeing sparks well after the actual lightshow is over. 

“Holy thit, Dave!”

“Alright so that needs a little more practice in front of your full-length mirror, but I’ve honestly always thought your obsession with me was kinda endearing.” Beat. And then, because making fun of him incorrectly is worse than doing it at all, he has standards: “Dental lisps don’t even catch on sh sounds—“

“Okay!  Okay, masterful rhetorical skills, but you know what I’m talking about, you ambulatory conglomerate of spittle and acute angles. You apparently know the man who Jane goddamn Crocker sent to kill us, and I’d appreciate making short work of this next expository segment so we can move on to literally anything actionable at all. Also, he has the name of a middle-aged accountant, and I just wanted to get that out there before I forgot.”

Sollux grimaces.  “He’s an ex.” Then, awkwardly: “Uh, ex coworker, I mean. Like a—like we used to work together, I’m sure you’re familiar with the general concept.” Nervous and aimless fingers work themselves against the handle of the oversized tuning fork.  

“Cute, that’s really...” Karkat’s mouth keeps moving for a good ten seconds of uninterrupted bullshit before he realizes he isn’t actually saying anything.  Sollux, half amused and half just as freaked out as he is, watches until it clicks. Karkat’s eyes widen (incidentally, under the almost unbearable glow of the streetlamp—Alternia is artificially lit almost round the clock, nominally for safety concerns—his shutter-pupils are narrowed near down to pinpricks) and then dart to the tuning fork that Sollux has still got slung over one shoulder.  

The air is dead again.  No sounds of overhead transport, no distant foot traffic, no monologuing. The space between the tines of the tuning fork ripples like fabric underwater. Sollux examines it, weighing it in his hands, testing its balance.  He mouths something at Karkat—which earns nothing more than a blank stare, *then* he gestures at Karkat’s ears, which Karkat dutifully covers with his palms. 

Sollux strikes the tuning fork against the ground, and the sound—amplifying, reverberating, physically rolling off in sheets—shatters the streetlamp with a shower of glass. The ambient noise of the city fades back in, though now their small corner of it is cast in shadow. 

“Uh,” says Karkat.  

“Sweet,” says Sollux.

“If you bust up my cool sword they’re going to take it out of my paycheck,” says a third voice from the bench.    
  
Karkat nearly jumps out of his skin, and Sollux’s hand reflexively finds his shoulder, squeezing it once. “Sup, Strider.”

Dave Strider looks like he’s having a rough day, and that’s with the helmet still on. “Sup, Captor,” he replies, with a healthy amount of sardonic drawl. He pulls himself to a sitting position, legs still horizontally draped over the rest of the bench. “‘S’been a minute.”    
  
Sollux scoffs at that--a sort of humorless, breathy noise that lifts his shoulders and sends his gaze askance. I-don’t-know-what-to-say plastered over by a thin veneer of I’m-not-going-to-dignify-that-with-a-response. After he peels his hand off Karkat’s shoulder his fingers are back in motion, picking at each other rather than the sword. He’s got hangnails on either side worried down to bloodied stumps.    
  
It’s hard to track Dave’s gaze, but he inclines his head towards Karkat. “So you’re the guy, right?”   
  
“The... guy?” Karkat shrugs off the ghost of Sollux’s grip with one shoulder, rolling out the imprint of warmth from his synthetic skin.    
  
“Yeah you know.” Dave pulls his knees up a little, resting his elbow on one sideways. “The guy. The—the whole-ass robot guy? The one Sollux took.”   
  
Karkat’s expression screws up about as quick as it takes those words to travel through dry air, and Sollux cuts him off just before he can get a word in edgewise: “I thought y’all had your panties knotted over the harness, KK— _Karkat_ —was in a scrap heap, they were getting ready to use him for spare parts.” He pauses for effect. “Sidebar note but eff-why-eye I just repaired him, I didn’t take him anywhere, he’s kind of almost, like, you know, his own person, or whatever.”   
  
That has Dave throwing his hands up defensively, and has Sollux noticing his black gloves for the first time. “Hey hey hey I wasn’t trying to be human normative or speciesist or carbonist or anything I was just askin’.”   
  
That finally pops Karkat’s teakettle off severely, and he claps his own hands together with a decisive snap. “What the fuck are you going on about?!  Was anybody there for the part where he tried to kill us twenty minutes ago, you—” he breaks the tangled fingers apart as he twists to look at Sollux, making a gesture in the air that looks a bit like he’s trying to crush a ripe melon “—you remember that, right? That part? The part where he hunted us down like stray dogs? The part with the sword?”   
  
“Rings a bell,” Sollux supplies, helpfully.   
  
“Am I losing my god damn mind? At what point did we all kiss and make up? I haven’t even gotten an apology over here.”

“Listen Sollux and I never said we made out—I mean made up—“

“Oh, my god.” 

“Out, up, they’re all just prepositions, who’s really to say? Dude, I’m—I’m concussed, really, I’m just super concussed, uh, do you expect a concussed man to really iron out all the nuances in these adverbial phrases, I’m not about to get down to the dirty details of these god damn colloquial semantics. Getting really wrist deep in the prescriptive, yawning birthing canal of the English language like, what do we have here? Anyway, I’m going to throw up.”

Dave promptly hauls his upper body over the back of the bench and flips his visor up enough to do just that.  

He was evidently not kidding about the concussion thing. 

Sollux, meanwhile, has a blooming, embarrassed warmth that started at the tips of his ears and has migrated down to his neck. Having volumes one and two of his sexual history yelling at each other directly under a shattered streetlamp in the middle of the night while one empties the contents of his stomach over the side of a city bench is really making him rethink some things, namely, his life and everything (everyone) he’s done in it. He clears his throat.    
  
“Just for the record, trying to kill us was still not great.”   
  
While still bodily hunched over the slats of the bench, Dave cranes one arm around to hold up an index finger: _one sec._ __   
  
Once he’s all well and done, he slides the visor closed again and sinks his ass back down on the bench with a groan. “I wasn’t trying to kill you and just to level with y’all I thought that was pretty fuckin' obvious.”   
  
Sollux and Karkat exchange looks. Karkat says, “No, we must have missed that part somehow,” which, to his credit, is pretty diplomatic.     
  
“Well as you sussed out, CrockerCorp’s panties, you know just to borrow the term, are so far up its ass over this deal it’s tasting both the fruit and the loom, really just getting a ripe load of cotton and flossing it out with the elastic band. Not to give you a whole economics lesson—” (Sollux groans) “—but its monopoly is really cinched by the fact it’s got a chokehold on the ins and outs of all its tech, and since it practically overtook the government through special interest groups back when it was Peixes’ circus—” (“—Yes, we know—”) “—you can’t breathe the word antitrust without getting a visit from a drone—” (“—Seriously the exposition is unnecessary—”) “—and you also can’t so much as crack one of your patented CrockerCorp home devices open to try and repair the fucking thing without losing your transportation and entertainment privileges for a year—” (“—Dave I was literally on their payroll can we just—”) “—which is wack as hell by the way—” (“Wait, what?”) “—once Sollux bopped out of there to play rebellion along with the summation of knowledge from his department and took not one but two CC pieces of equipment with him—” (“Seriously can we go back to the part where you called CrockerCorp wack as hell?”) “—people kind of lost their marbles.”   
  
Dave pauses, takes a deep breath, and leans over the bench to puke again.   
  
“Okay, first of all,” Karkat says after giving himself a solid five seconds to process what just happened, “gross. Secondly, what does that have to do with you not killing us? Third—do you need to see a fucking doctor or what?”   
  
“I didn’t feel like it. The whole killing thing or whatever.”

“...What?”

Dave scrubs at his face with his glove. “Either of y’all have a breath mint?”

“You didn’t _feel_ like it?  You hunted us! Like dogs! I think I went over this!”

“And yet somehow you’re both miraculously uninjured after I practically crawled around the subway system and love-tapped you with a sword that one of you jerkoffs managed to shatter a lamppost with, meanwhile here I am with my absolute shit kicked in by some skinny nerd with sparklepowers a la Jubilee from a vintage 20th century comic about superpowered boarding schools, so did it ever occur to you maybe I wasn’t putting my best foot forward?” 

The gears turning in Sollux and Karkat’s shared brain cell are practically audible. Karkat’s fan even kicks on. What Sollux misread as professionalism half an hour ago might be better learned as stalling. 

“Uh,” says Karkat. 

“Hm,” says Sollux.  

“Fuckin’ exactly,” says the third voice from the bench once he manages to scrape himself back together.  “How about that breath mint, though?”


	3. Chapter 3

Even criminals in Alternia have CrockerCorp profiles (oftentimes restricted, depending on if they’re an on-record felon, though anybody could really be awarded that label for any number of arbitrary reasons), which is how you purchase credit for groceries, transportation, and the like. Karkat, however, doesn’t have one, and Sollux’s started being mysteriously declined the moment he split from the company, so they have to use Dave’s to rent a cruiser. 

It’s the first time they’ve had a legal ride since they signed on board with this whole subversion business, and it’s pretty cozy, to be totally honest. They go to a kiosk about two blocks east from the Underground (Dave insists he’s fine to walk, but his feet catch against themselves more than once) and he swipes his card.  There’s one there in a manner of minutes, largely identical to the ones already dotting the night sky. 

Like anything else synced up to the CrockerCorp collective, it’s got those same cyan blue accents as the drones—anything disconnected from their network slips into a warning-red, as Karkat Vantas himself could tell you. The undersides are lit with neon blue, too; it paints an almost distant multilayered sky, one of the many reasons most districts (Alternia especially) never get the privilege of darkness. Once they get in, Dave punches in his citizen ID and destination coords (provided by Karkat and Sollux) on the dashboard and the whole cruiser hums, lifting to join the flow of traffic. 

“At least we can use the commuter lane,” Dave says dryly. He claims the entire backseat—it flies on autopilot. Human drivers just can’t be trusted to prevent accidents, especially with how busy the skies of Alternia are and how incomprehensible the three-dimensional lane system is to anybody with a meatsack between their ears. As is, it’s so safe you don’t even need seatbelts. Sollux and Karkat settle in front physically and right into an uncomfortable silence metaphorically. Dave’s dumb sword lays awkwardly at their feet.

“Ex _coworker_ , huh?”

“Not technically incorrect,” Sollux murmurs, looking out the side window to the cruisers whizzing below, above, and beside them. They constitute an artificial fabric within the space that moves so quickly that staring is enough to make nearly anyone with human eyes sick, and he fiddles with the stream of air coming off the dash. 

“Are there no rules against office romances among our said aforementioned dystopian overlords?”

“There are,” says Dave from the back, “but if anyone started enforcin’ them my brother would have to stop boinking Jake English and that would be bad for morale, apparently.”

“I thought we agreed that you’d pretend you couldn’t hear us.”

“Right right right, sorry.”

Rather than speculate on the lurid details of the latest Strider-English scandal, Sollux shifts to look back at Dave. He’s sprawled out much like he was on the bench, helmet resting sideways against the window. The damn thing’s still on, so it’s hard to tell if his eyes are open or not.  “Do you want me to check your concussion or are you just going to stew in that thing all night?”

His noise is noncommittal.  Sollux reaches back to try and flip up the visor—Dave catches his wrist, fast enough to startle him. His grip is hard enough that his quiet tone is in complete dissonance. “I’m good,” he says, without releasing him.   
  
“Jesus, Dave, you’re crushing me.” He tries to read past the tinted visor, but he can’t see more than the vaguest shape of his head. Sollux’s fingers work the air like they had with the harness. His voice is a shade above a mumble.   
  
“—Right, right right right, sorry.” Dave lets him go, looking at Sollux’s hand, then his own gloved one. Now Karkat’s the one politely pretending he can’t hear the conversation.   
  
“What’s up with you and that stupid helmet, exactly? You look like a massive douchebag.”

“It’s a comfort object, I’m bein’ comforted.”   
  
“Bullshit.”   
  
Dave offers no response. His shoulders shift as he repositions himself. The helmet clinks stupidly against the stupid window.   
  
“Bullshit,” Sollux repeats, louder.    
  
“I think he heard you the first time, Captor.” Karkat’s irritation is audible but aimless. It’s a general frustration whittled down into a throwaway line; he isn’t angry, certainly not at Sollux, at least, but he’s... uncertain, stressed. There’s a god damn CrockerCorp operative in the backseat and apparently they’ve shared some romantic real estate. He’s still staring out the front window; his equilibrium is harder to unbalance than a human’s.    
  
Sollux continues, unfettered. “Neither of us loved the company but I am extremely hard-pressed to believe the revolutionary stirrings in your very soul just kind of materialized into action just because you were suddenly not feeling it anymore, not least of all because I never thought Dirk would let—”   
  
“Dirk wasn’t letting or not letting me do nothin’. Contrary to popular fucking belief I’m almost like my own person,” he says, and Sollux wonders if the callback to what he’d said about Karkat was intentional or not. Dave also snapped at him so quickly it’s clearly a response he anticipated. It works; Sollux reflexively lets it drop. Some subjects became ground that was trodden, over-trodden, and then barred over the course of their relationship. Dirk Strider was one of the first.     
  
He concedes with a long, deflating exhale and settles back against the faux-leather seat. His hand itches; he wants to reach out to someone, but isn’t sure who. So he settles for neither. Sollux’s hands find each other, picking again at raw skin.    
  
That lasts for all of about twenty seconds before Karkat reaches over, swats his hands apart to keep them from destroying themselves, and firmly takes one of Sollux’s hands in his. Karkat’s thumb takes over from Sollux’s nails and he brushes it against his red-picked skin without a word. Karkat’s own artificial skin is still surprisingly soft, though it doesn’t produce its own heat. The heat Karkat puts off comes deeper, from his core and the machinery working overtime to keep him alive; he’s a refugee of spare parts and illegally-crimson eyes.    
  
“...Can I at least have my sword back?” Dave asks after a couple of minutes.   
  
“No,” Karkat and Sollux chorus in unison, which tugs an obnoxious snort out of the latter.    
  
“So not stabbing either of you wasn’t enough of an enduring show of loyalty?”   
  
“As touching as that is—and really, truly, I am touched,” Karkat says, decidedly untouched, “—we have to check in with our glorious leader first.”

“That’s who we’re going to meet?”

“God, no. We’re going to meet her girlfriends.”   
  
“What the fuck? I mean, word, but what’s with the extended screening process, I’d like to bring your attention back to the part where I let my ex boyfriend scramble my brain like huevos rancheros.”   
  
Sollux cuts in: “To get the record straight real quick I kicked your ass fair and square—”   
  
“I stood outside the train and let you take a swing at me like I was a piñata and your parents just legally separated twenty minutes before someone brought the cookie cake in, shut up, I didn’t realize the whole little rebellion club y’all had goin’ on was so exclusive, was my only point.”   
  
“Jane has spies everywhere,” Karkat says, “and quite goddamn frankly we can’t just let every twink with sharp hip bones in our operation whenever they bat their eyelashes.”   
  
“—What was that about my hip bones?”   
  
Karkat opens his mouth and snaps it shut again. It’s a testament to his good luck and his good luck only that that’s the exact moment something collides with the back of their cruiser.   
  
Dave goes spilling out of the back seat like a concussed fish dumped on dry land. Sollux barely manages to catch himself against the dash with the hand not holding Karkat’s and his wrist sings with the impact. Karkat, on the other hand–too engrossed with the things he may or may not have just said about Dave Strider’s hip bones–gets a sternum full of the front panel hard enough that it rings in his metallic rib cage. It’s an unpleasant noise. He wheezes something that sounds a little bit like the phrase “what the fuck,” if you were to pull the phrase “what the fuck” clean through a rotating garbage disposal with an aluminum fork.    
  
Sollux is the first to recover, checking both his boyfriend and the console for any meaningful damage. Karkat checks out alright—there’s a shallow divot where some of his front casing, underneath artificial skin, absorbed most of the impact—and the panel clearly shows that the autopilot should be fully functioning. So why the collision? Sollux shifts to rest his weight on one knee against the seat so he can pivot around and look out the back window; there’s another cruiser, identical to their own, which had rammed into them.    
  
They’re still both hurtling forward in the lane at incredible speed. Everything around them remains a cyan blur.   
  
Accidents aren’t just rare; they’re nearly impossible with the level of care CrockerCorp has invested towards the AI of their privatized public transport systems. Every inch of every lane and every route is mapped out meticulously, so how—   
  
Somehow the second time is nearly as surprising as the first. Another cruiser comes in hard against the passenger side; the sound of a hairline fracture crawling up the window is swallowed beneath scraping metal. Karkat, made of the same stuff as the transport ships, is just as unyielding when Sollux collides into him. His head snaps against Karkat’s shoulder.   
  
It hurts just a little bit like a bitch.   
  
Vaguely, vaguely, he’s aware that somewhere above him the emergency exit panel is sighing its way open, air whistling over the disengaged latch. Dave’s figure has balanced itself on the back of the front seat, and he’s pulling his torso out—fuck, the sword’s gone too, that little shit—   
  
Sollux isn’t sure if he has any right to feel quite this betrayed but he’s going to do it anyway. God. God! He and Karkat are so fucked. His stupid ex and his stupid sculpted hip bones have well and truly fucked them all the way up.    
  
To add insult to injury, Dave nudges the back of Sollux’s head with his light-up sneaker from his position standing on the back of the chair. Sollux would snap his foot off (sneaker and all) at the ankle if he could.   
  
“Are you going to get this thing going or nah?” Dave asks, punctuating the question with a sharper prod.   
  
“Hn?”   
  
“Oh come on dude, only one head injury allowed on board. I’ve seen you hijack one of these pieces of shit before, let’s get a move on before CrockerCorp knocks us out of the sky.”   
  
Oh. Just kidding.   
  
Sollux blinks once, twice, then looks at Karkat, who seems to have finally extracted himself from the console. They’re essentially piled together on the left side of the front seat, and Karkat gives him a look with those shock-crimson eyes that could only be described as vaguely deer-in-the-headlights.   
  
“You’re going to have to steer,” Sollux informs him frankly.    
  
“I’m going to have to _what_.”   
  
The harness is retrieved from the bag again; Sollux is hooking himself up while Karkat really takes a moment to let that sink in.   
  
“You’re not seriously going to try to fly this thing, are you?”   
  
“I used to moonlight as a pilot for CC’s emergency transport after they ripped my fucking back out and gave me a new one, it’s fine.” He pauses before he kicks the base of the panel open with his heel. “Just, you know, eheh, uh, this sucker’s going a little, faster, and there’s a lot going on, so, you know, I’m going to need your reflexes and visual-processing speed.”     
  
By the time the third cruiser plants itself against the other side, the three of them are at least braced for it. Karkat holds Sollux steady by the waist and Dave steady by one ankle.   
  
“Fuck, fuck, fine! Whatever that means, just fucking do it!”    
  
“That’s the spirit, KK.” Sollux gets the electrodes on the other end of the harness hooked up to the panel. “I’m going to close my eyes and you’re going to move my hand like you’re playing an arcade game, I’ll just follow your lead like that.”   
  
“Nevermind, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life!”   
  
“It is,” Sollux agrees, “but I can’t parse what’s fucking going on out there and you’re just going to have to deal.” He guides Karkat to take one of his wrists. “Besides, I trust you. More than anything.”   
  
“I—that’s really sweet Sollux but I still don’t—”   
  
“Anyway,” Sollux rips out the CrockerCorp server chip and the cyan lights in the cruiser blink once in warning and then go black.   
  
Just as a fourth cruiser nearly pins them in at the front side, they drop out of the sky;   
  
Dave would be a speck in the atmosphere without Karkat’s grip on his ankle;   
  
Sollux’s heart tries to escape through his mouth;   
  
Karkat feels the pressure dip in his chest;   
  
For what feels like an eternity   
  
They fall   
  
And   
  
The lights kick back on (red and blue, the custom colors of Sollux’s harness, generating power from his artificially augmented nervous system) just before they hit the lane of traffic directly below them. Karkat’s teeth snap shut at the gracelessness of the descent; luckily he doesn’t have breath to catch. Also, true to his incredibly ill-advised word, Sollux’s eyes are closed.   
  
With just a little focus (his pupils expand like that camera, like that shutter, taking in as much information as he can) he sees the cruisers as individual units, not just the cyan smears that human eyes struggle to process. When he tips Sollux’s wrist down, Sollux ducks their cruiser down; when he brings it up or to either side, Sollux complies, wordlessly and seamlessly. Karkat almost laughs in surprise, in relief, at the absurdity of it all. Maybe this wasn’t such an awful idea.    
  
They have, however, not lost their tails.    
  
Dave has crawled as far out of the cruiser as he can without tumping himself unceremoniously out the top. The crushing force of the air passing over the car doesn’t help his balance, much, but the robotic hand wrapped tight around his leg is enough to prevent some awkwardly-timed tragedy. He swings the tuning fork through the air and the world stands still; the moment one agent is smart enough to follow them in a sharp arc downward, he brings his weapon crashing against the side of the cruiser Sollux has commandeered and the soundwaves shatter the front paneling of the pursuer’s. The loss of the internal AI sends that first CrockerCorp vessel into a plummet, and the cityscape rises to swallow it.    
  
It also deals damage to some surrounding vehicles—the thing isn’t exactly a precision weapon, and Dave’s doing the best he can with how fast the goddamn things are moving. It isn’t severe enough to send any nosediving alongside the first, but it’s enough to disrupt the carefully constructed flow of traffic. To say it causes a few fender benders would be understating the situation.   
  
“Shit! Sorry!” Dave’s voice is swallowed by the headwind. Whatever, they can compare insurance information later. Ha ha. Little monopolized economy jokes.   
  
“What the fuck are you doing up there, Strider?” Karkat pulls his eyes away from the windshield just long enough to shoot a glare up at their favorite hitchhiker, and then swears as Sollux nearly has them blindly crashing into a suppliers’ lane. Okay, so maybe Karkat celebrated the idea a little early. It’s still pretty awful. His coolant system rattles uselessly.     
  
“Unless your glorious leader allows everybody a plus-one on the first meeting we’re gonna need to whittle some of these guys off,” Dave says, trying to shake his leg loose of Karkat’s hand.   
  
“We can cancel the meeting entirely if you make yourself a fleshy smear against the ground,” he replies, realizing that, hey, maybe having a spontaneously free evening wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world compared to how things are going. Still, his fingers don’t loosen.

“I’ve got this, I’ve got this.  I’ve, like, got this whole shebang handled, put a little bow on it ‘cause it’s about to get wrapped up.”

He kicks again and Karkat reluctantly releases him. He can’t wrestle him and keep Sollux on track at the same time. And, all things considered, the latter is taking priority.     
  
Dave pulls himself out of the top hatch of the cruiser. Somewhere below him, he can hear Sollux suck a breath of concern through his teeth, jaw locked so tight he’d skin the air if he could. Outside, the night is beautiful, the air is cooling as the hour deepens, and the void below him plunges into limitless nothing. He stays on his stomach as he gets his bearings, one leg still in and one leg out. The three cruisers chasing them do the basic decency of making themselves recognizable, at least; they’re the only ones (not counting the fairly impressive cruiser pileup) that break formation, diverging from the precalculated flight paths. However, they follow slower than the first and not as directly, having learned from the first’s mistakes. They’re still about a row’s worth of traffic directly above them.   
  
It gives Dave a few more moments to figure out what the fuck he’s doing, exactly. He flips the tuning fork around in his hands, using his thickly-padded gloves to grasp the forked blade as he uses the hilt to hook on the rim of the top hatch. It allows extra support to scoot down the sloped back of the cruiser—a jostle nearly has him losing his grip, and he swears loudly.    
  
There’s a hiss and a sizzle as a blaster bolt pings off a spot directly beside his head, and he realizes laying face down is not the exact place he wants to be.    
  
With a groan of exertion Dave then rolls himself onto his back, one arm now hooked under and around the sword nearly like an awkward half-hug. He pats himself down for the standard-issue blaster that neither Sollux or Karkat had thought to search him for—the end result is a gun just barely bigger than his palm. He points straight up and he screws one eye shut and it dryfires,  _fucking dryfires, surely Crocker coulda taken the extra plunge to fit them out with rilfes or something—_

Dave smacks it hard against the side of the ship a couple times as a cruiser above them starts to take another pass downwards—then he points, squeezes, and fires. The vague figure of an agent ducks safely back inside the window they’d been shooting from, but that wasn’t where Dave had been aiming. The cyan-light underbelly shatters with a gratifying shower of glass, and one little patch of sky goes dark. Its silhouette highlights itself against the piercing streams of blue light, and glass catches in the current of air between the lanes of ships like so much sideways rain, showering harmlessly against the front paneling of the cruisers behind them.    
  
Before he can fire again, Karkat and Sollux slip into another nosedive to duck below an intersection, and the slope of the cruiser provides just enough windbreak for him not to be flattened out completely against the top. It forces him to drop his arm, though, now full-body koala clinging against his sword that stays miraculously hooked in place. His back lifts a scant few inches off the surface of the ship, half weightless with the drop in altitude.   
  
Two of the hostile cruisers blend back into the stream of ships once they’ve cleared the intersection, but the one with the broken paneling is easy enough to pick out from the flow of traffic the moment Sollux rights the ship back onto a steady course. While still latched onto the sword as well as he can be, Dave concentrates fire with the shitty blaster until the darkened cruiser’s windshield starts to shatter under the repetition of blasts, and it’s forced to peel away from the fight.  

That gives the final two assailants just enough time to position themselves directly overhead; they drop to either side of the <st>hijacked</st> borrowed ship while Dave’s concentration is elsewhere. The blaster beeps to let him know it’s overheating. He chucks it at one of the CrockerCorp ships. It dings harmlessly off the side before getting snagged by the air currents, but at least it’s cathartic.    
  
Dave hauls himself up by the blade of the sword just enough to poke his head back down inside the ship.   
  
“Hey, lovebirds, you’re gonna need to brace for another impac—”   
  
The CrockerCorp agents make another pass at pinning them in place. This time, the two cruisers get them in a tight enough vice to make the side paneling groan in protest, and the external panels begin to buckle inwards. The windows of the assailants’ ships are too darkly tinted to see through, but the previously-fractured glass on the passenger side of the rebels’ ship nearly shatters entirely.    
  
Dave braces himself one-handed against the inner rim of the hatch as the reduction in speed nearly sends him flying over the front and off the cruiser. When he winces, Sollux’s eyes finally crack open and look up. Their gazes catch one another’s before Sollux’s shifts over to Karkat.

“Go help him.”

“Hold on—“

“We won’t be doing much steering like this, KK, and I can’t unplug myself without the whole thing losing power, just—please?”    
  
The high note of sincerity tugs the last word a half octave higher than Sollux’s typical register, and Karkat’s frown is softened by it.   
  
“Fuck! _Fuck._ Fuck, fine, but I’m the only one without some kind of goddamn fancy Crocker tech.”   
  
“You _are_ goddamn fancy Crocker tech,” Dave reminds him, reaching a hand down to give Karkat a boost. “C’mon, let’s look alive.”    
  
That nets another glare, but Karkat shifts to grab Dave’s wrist, and Dave easily pulls him out of the cruiser and onto the roof. They’re going just slowly enough now that being swept off their feet is no longer an immediate threat, but it’s forcing the AI-driven traffic to recalibrate itself around the obstruction, not unlike a shimmering blue school of fish parting around an outcropping of rock.    
  
Again, would be pretty beautiful without that backdrop of seemingly endless void that they’re still sort of contending with.   
  
The cruiser below them groans again as the ships on either side continue, in earnest, to crush it.    
  
“What are you packing?” Dave asks, straightening up, sword slung over one shoulder. Karkat decides that he’d cut something of an impressive figure if he hadn’t been throwing up over a park bench half an hour ago.   
  
“What am I _what_?”   
  
“Do you have any heat?”   
  
“I’m—hold on.” Karkat gropes around the inside of his own jacket before holding out a switchblade for Dave’s... ex...amination? Approval??   
  
“Jesus Christ, well, if you pop a screw loose we’ll at least have a flathead to get it back on with.”   
  
“Did I or _did I not_ tell you I am not exactly keeping pace with either of you organic boneheads with my quote-unquote heat?”   
  
“Actually, don’t say it like that.”   
  
“Say it like what?”   
  
“Nevermind.”   
  
The window on the right-passenger side finally gives up the ghost, and the sound of glass pooling on the floor of their own cruiser brings them back into focus.   
  
“—You at least know how to use that thing?”   
  
“Yes, I at least know how to use this thing!”   
  
“Good enough, then let’s make it happen. Yeehaw.” Dave takes two steps and plunges his sword into the cruiser to their left. It goes in cleanly, like a hunting knife into an empty soda can. Bottle opener, meet bottle, ex cetera.    
  
Asking what was going on hasn’t done much for Karkat thusfar, so he decides to forgo the questioning and get right down to... some kind of business, undefined, involving the hunting knife Sollux also found in the same scrap heap he came from. He flips it in his hand and catches it by the hilt, then goes to the opposite cruiser—the one on the right—with the vague intention of trying to pry the hatch open like Dave was apparently doing.   
  
He doesn’t need to put in the effort. The moment he steps onto the roof of the other ship, the hatch opens on its own with the same sort of mechanic, rattling sigh. An all-black clad (some kind of cyberpunk linen suit) arm plants itself on the roof, pulling out an all-black clad (really went all out with the cyberpunk linen suit) man behind it. While he may be, thematically, underdressed, his hat is pretty bitchin, which Karkat takes a moment to note with a small amount of begrudging respect. The spade emblazoned on his lapel is a tipoff that something, perhaps, is amiss.    
  
“Hey! Aren’t you supposed to be wanking around Midnight City? Who let the clowns out on parade?” Midnight City is, as far as districts go, really no better than Alternia. Considerably smaller and less well-patrolled, maybe, but that comes with the trade-off of almost exclusively being controlled by local gangs who got rich on back alley cryptocurrency and hawking off decommissioned Crocker tech. Of the districts, Peixes’ influence had historically been the weakest in Midnight City before her adopted daughter inherited the company. However, the man in front of him has a reputation that precedes him.    
  
“I’m goin’ to make you swallow that god damn penknife a’ yours, kid.” A little hypocritical, maybe, considering that, from here, Karkat can tell he’s pretty much also just wielding a knife. Karkat is somewhat reassured by the fact that at least he brought a knife to what is apparently just a knife fight.    
  
Spades Slick takes a broad swipe at him, and Karkat steps back, foot nearly catching in the crevice between the two cruisers. His back hits Dave’s, and he risks a glance over his shoulder to see what’s going on on the other side of the party; he’s rewarded with the sight of two actually _clown-themed fools_ which have clamored their way out of the hunk of metal Dave’s sword has carved from their ship. Karkat doesn’t recognize either of them, but they’re wearing obscene amounts of both leather and greasepaint. CrockerCorp is truly beyond parody, and Karkat suddenly knows why Slick was maybe a little sensitive about being reminded of the company he’s being forced(?) to keep—though it still doesn’t explain why he’s here in the first place.   
  
He isn’t able to jerk sideways fast enough to avoid Slick’s next attempt at a stab—it hits home not far from the divet where he’d connected with the dashboard of the cruiser, and his coolant system rattles hard enough he can feel it vibrating his entire torso. Excess air whistles from the newly carved slit in his chest, and his pain sensors aren’t given the benefit of anything as human as going into shock. Instead, they light up immediately in response.    
  
Karkat grabs Slick’s arm before he’s able to retract it, which, frankly, manages to startle both of them. In a moment of panic, Karkat—with the benefit of a metallic skull—headbutts him hard enough to send him stumbling backwards. Before he can regain his balance on the smooth cruiser roof, Karkat rams a shoulder square into the center of his chest, and he topples over the side.    
  
It’s a long way down; Karkat doesn’t celebrate long enough to see where he ends up.   
  
He keeps the knife pressed into his torso—he doesn’t bleed, can’t bleed, but it keeps his system from spitting out all the cold, compressed air. It hurts like a bitch, acute and warning; pain is, ironically, something Sollux gave him. It came with a salvaged instinct for survival that he wasn’t supposed to be built with. In the moment, he doesn’t feel particularly grateful.   
  
Dave sucks in air in a way that’s already nearly familiar, and Karkat—one set of fingers curled around the knife in his hand, the _other_ wrapped around the knife in his chest—does another quick assessment of the situation. There’s a clown laying prone about five feet from their own head, expression fixed skyward in a singularly asinine and unnerving greasepainted grin. The other clown has some kind of electric whip wrapped around Dave’s arm, which crackles and sparks and smells like ozone in the same way that Sollux sometimes does. Dave is so tense that he looks brittle and fragile, completely immobilized by the current. The hand holding his sword is trembling.   
  
Karkat has been acting without thinking for the last five to ten minutes and he isn’t about to start doing any intensive calculations now; he winds up and throws his shitty switchblade. The clown, hair styled in an orange that’s just as electric as the whip, doesn’t even look at him as she catches the blade like some kind of trained circus freak. She tips her head and smiles at Karkat directly, gaze finally trailing away from Dave.   
  
“Oh, nevermind, fuck you in particular!”   
  
Karkat takes the blade out from his own chest and nails her between the eyes with it. The clown loses her grip on her weapon as she crumples like a deck of cards. She bleeds just like he can’t. It isn’t a good feeling. Karkat doesn’t dwell on it.    
  
(Aside from the fact that he takes about two seconds to punt a clown head off the ship, which is admittedly a little cathartic).   
  
Dave slumps over with a certain loose synchronicity with the now-late member of his dance card, though he manages not to lose his handle on his sword, even for the sake of cradling his arm. Karkat doesn’t hesitate, hooking his arms under Dave’s armpits and dragging him back through the hatch.   
  
“That was sort of hot,” Dave mumbles, unprompted, and apparently to nobody in particular.   
  
“Oh, my God.”   
  
“M’electrified and concussed, leave me alone."   



	4. Chapter 4

The cruiser is all but unpilotable. Sollux pushes it as far as he can, but it’s more of a dragging, painstakingly-controlled fall than true flight. Dave is curled up around his arm in the backseat through the entire descent; he’s so quiet that even Karkat can’t help but be concerned.    
  
Sollux gets them landed outside a shitty two-caegar-a-night pod hostel, not far from another cruiser kiosk. Somewhere above them—above the artificial cyan-blue sky of traffic—the sun has started to rise. Not much true sunlight reaches the lower streets of Alternia, but something in the air feels different: the dry warmth of the night starts to sharpen, and the neon reds and bronzes and golds of the streets sharpen with it. That same sharp heat fights weakly against the post-harness-induced headache that nearly has Sollux laid out flat, but he doesn’t need the help. There’s too much left to be done.    
  
He can rest when they rip his back out again.    
  
Ha, ha.    
  
Sollux sends a couple of encrypted messages to their rebellion contacts to request an extraction. Roxy assures him that she and Calliope will be there within half an hour; it stems the admonitions he’d been getting for missing their meeting.    
  
Now, on the topic of his boyfriend ~~s~~.   
  
“I am, for sure, gutting that shitty coolant system of yours when we get back,” he tells Karkat, who’s propped up on the right side of the front seat next to the still-shattered window. Karkat’s palm is still pressed against the place where his torso caught the knife, air leaking out past his hand in fits and spurts. Something in his chest rattles so hard Sollux can hardly hear himself.   
  
“ _Your_ shitty coolant system,” Karkat reminds him.    
  
“Right,” Sollux agrees, as if he’d forgotten, “my shitty coolant system.” There’s a guilt and a fondness that are hard to extract from one another, but he reaches over and squeezes Karkat’s arm.    
  
Karkat loses his grip on his expression long enough to let slip a rare smile, then he waves Sollux off. “Go check on Dave, he looks like dogshit warmed over and served with a garnish of additional lukewarm dogshit.”    
  
“God, you’re such a poet.”    
  
Sollux slips into the backseat and settles next to Dave’s legs, which are curled up against his torso. It’s been hard to get a real sense for the damage with the goddamn helmet, but he was fully lucid immediately after, and Sollux decided to take that as a good sign. (Even if he apparently used his available consciousness to hit on Sollux’s boyfriend, which Sollux admittedly wasn’t as upset about as he would have expected to be).   
  
“Dave?” Sollux asks, softly. There’s no answer. He tries again: “DV?”   
  
Dave stirs. For a moment, Sollux wonders if he’s asleep, until he finally clears his throat and replies, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, haven’t heard that one in a while.”

“Hah.” The fondness and guilt make a reappearance in this second act of the conversation. The latter is a comfortable routine regarding just about anything involving Dave Strider.  The former sort of sneaks up on him. “I’m going to check out your head and arm, and this time you’re not going to be a baby about it.”   
  
Yet Sollux still surprised when Dave silently holds his arm out towards him. There are thick, black burn marks roped around the red velvet. His palm is loose and open, facing upwards, though still trembling. Sollux shifts closer and gingerly removes the glove. Familiar fingers curl and twitch in the open air; the unsteadiness has Sollux frowning.   
  
“You can calm down, I’m not going to bite.”   
  
Dave apparently finds something about that funnier than he’d expected, and he snorts, tipping his head back against the window. “M’not worried,” he says.   
  
The fact he hasn’t snapped at him yet is a good sign, at least. Sollux rolls his sleeve up as far as he dares, then sucks a breath through his teeth when he sees what’s underneath. Wordlessly, he places his hands on either side of Dave’s helmet and slides it off. Cyan blue irises meet him there, the pupils narrowed and angular at the edges like camera shutters. It’s the same cyan blue as the lights glowing softly beneath the melted skin on his arm. His fingers twitch again, erratically. Not nervous. Threatening to short-circuit.    
  
“What did he do to you, Dave?”   
  
Sollux isn’t sure if he flinches or if the electricity just has all of his hardware that twitchy, but it clearly sends Dave back on the defensive either way. The identity of the ‘he’ isn’t in question. “You mean save my fuckin’ life? Will you just—can you just not jump to conclusions about my brother for once, maybe?” Sollux doesn’t respond. His silence prompts Dave further: “He and Jane Crocker were convinced that Midnight City needed to be brought under reign, and they started hiring local guys out from there, but it was about as effective as funneling more money into turf wars so they had to send extra firepower, and, um—there was, an incident, okay, it wasn’t like—he isn’t some kind of evil mastermind, alright? He isn’t out to ruin my god damn life. He’s just a guy, and he tries to do his best by me, or whatever, and, he saved what he could and built back the rest and, ta da, I am now the cyborg sex god you see before you today.”    
  
Sollux isn’t sure if Dave breathes a single time during the entire monologue, horribly blue eyes fixed on some distant point beyond the windshield of the cruiser. Sollux isn’t breathing either.   
  
It takes another twenty seconds before Sollux collects himself enough to speak. In that time, he draws blood at a hangnail again, scraping his picked-down nails against each other.    
  
“Kind of a shitty robot if you got concussed,” he says, eventually.   
  
“Part robot. I still have my brain, don’t make me explain the science to you ‘cause it’ll somehow be embarrassing for us both.”   
  
“...Is that why you left? The accident, and—”   
  
“No,” Dave says, quick and sincere.    
  
“Fuck me running, Dave, if that wasn’t the last straw, then what was?”   
  
Dave’s eyes dance from the windshield down to Sollux’s hands, working themselves raw. “When they told me to kill you.” He pauses for a beat, then raises his voice again: “I told y’all I didn’t feel like it, didn’t I? Ain’t no aforementioned dystopian overlords are goin’ to shell out money for me to kill _my_ ex-boyfriend.” He pauses. “Not until they enter union negotiations, at least.” He’s still staring down at Sollux’s hands.   
  
“I never thought Dave Strider would develop a martyr complex,” Sollux manages, at a loss for anything else to say.   
  
“Naw, nothing that complicated,” Dave responds, and finally pries one of Sollux’s hands away from the other. “Stop fuckin’ with your hangnails, though, I told you they’ll never heal like that.”   
  
The heat crawls down from Sollux’s ears and canvases his entire face. “Hold that thought.”   
  
Sollux twists, leaning back over the divide of the front seat in an attempt to find his bag again. It’s been kicked under the console, and he shimmies far enough over to snag it with his fingertips. Karkat doesn’t even pretend he wasn’t listening to every word, and leans in to inform Sollux in that charming half-yell he uses when he thinks he’s being quiet: “If you don’t kiss him all three of us are going to pop a fuse.”   
  
“Learn to whisper, you polyamorous disaster,” Sollux fires back before papping his boyfriend’s cheek placatingly.   
  
He then slides back in place alongside Dave, clearing his throat once. “If you’re going to join Feferi Peixes’ and Karkat Vantas’ charming band of merry rebels, we’re disconnecting you from the Crocker network, first.”    
  
Dave’s eyebrows shoot up into his hairline. “Wait, wait, wait, it’s him and Peixes’ bio kid?”   
  
“Surprise, surprise, you passed your first interview. It looks like Dirk gave you pain sensors in whichever limbs he replaced, so this isn’t going to feel great.” He gets a screwdriver and does some quick figuring underneath the burned-out skin until he finds what he’s looking for. When the chip yields—like it had in Karkat—Dave’s eyes go blank for a moment, then kick back online in that same treasonous red as Karkat’s. He blinks rapidly, twice, then laughs, flexing his fingers.   
  
“I’ll be damned.”   
  
Sollux would be lying if he said it wasn’t a good look on him.   
  
He’s distantly aware of Karkat’s head poking over the edge of the seat. Further out, more distant still, he can hear the landing of another cruiser and the approach of two sets of feet. Further—even further—the sun is still rising, warm as his boys’ eyes, on a day that promises to maybe suck a little bit less than the days that had preceded it.    
  
Sollux kisses Dave just as Karkat’s coolant system calms to a quiet, content hum. His own post-harness headache dulls to background noise along with it.   
  
Everything is going to be okay. And for now, the three of them can rest.

**Author's Note:**

> I love this prompt!! Your Dear Polyswap letter was also super cute. I hope this is all the angst, gore, blood, crime, & happy endings you wanted!


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